Confessions of a netball dad: The worst things I’ve seen courtside in NZ

Illustration / Rod Emmerson

OPINION

For 10 years, I have been a netball dad, in which time I have seen enough to be sure that at the school level, the game meets every criteria to be considered toxic, devoid of core values, dominated by adults with big egos and warped ethics and elite players with a hard-to-understand sense of entitlement.

What follows are true confessions from my time standing courtside.

Netball dad

I think I was the only who heard the crack. But half of the Southern Hemisphere heard the agonised scream that followed.

The crack was my daughter’s arm being broken – the scream was her registering the pain.

As I ran on to the court to comfort her, I registered the absurdity that there she was, clutching what was an obviously broken arm, while playing a supposed non-contact sport.

But I had been involved in netball for long enough to know the sport and absurdity went hand-in-hand.

I’m being kind, of course, because netball isn’t so much the master of the absurd as utterly toxic and rotten to its core.

That my daughter’s arm was broken that day saddened me, but it didn’t surprise me.

There’s so much tension and warped values floating around netball centres that injuries which are the result of needless aggression are inevitable.

My daughter didn’t break her arm so much as have it broken. She collected a loose ball fair and square, only for an opposing player to grab it two, if not three seconds later.

She didn’t just grab it though - she tried to wrench it out of my daughter’s hands, and did so with enough force to break her arm.

This wasn’t the result of ill-timed exuberance, but a deliberate plan the opposition coach had been encouraging all game – that and challenging every call the umpires made and throwing the ball away when they were penalised.

If I hadn’t been sure the incident was deliberate or that netball was toxic beforehand, I certainly was when I walked my daughter off the court to the first aid room, only to hear the opposition coach congratulate the arm-breaker for her great work.

My life as a netball dad began when my oldest daughter was at primary school.

The school had a team but no one to coach them, and so despite being utterly clueless about the rules and how the game worked, I volunteered.

In my naïvety, I couldn’t see how this was anything other than a good idea. Kids getting exercise, building a life-long love of sport and its wholesome values of teamwork, unity and camaraderie.

I had three goals, which were to make our one practice a week fun; to get at least seven players to turn up on game day and for everyone involved to like it enough that they would want to keep playing the following year.

At some schools, my lack of interest in winning would have been intolerable, but these girls were aged between 9 and 11, and it felt not so much ridiculous as wrong to have any focus on the outcome of each game.

I soon found out that my philosophy was not shared by many other schools or parents, who seemed to be unduly anxious each week about how their team was performing, how their child was playing and whether their team was winning.

The idea of netball being fun was anathema to many parents on the sidelines, who encouraged/yelled at their child to work harder, to pass better, to be more careful with their shooting and pay more attention.

Frustrated groans accompanied every lost possession and missed shot and the disappointment was palpable when some parents heard the final whistle and had to accept their child’s team had lost.

The mad, daft thing was that our team mostly won each week, and we could hardly have cared less, which only seemed to antagonise other schools.

And because we were winning, we earned a reputation as the team to beat, and by midway through the competition, our games carried this heightened sense of being grudge matches.

Parents being worked up about primary school sport felt like the most ridiculous thing I’d seen, but sadly, I was to discover the depths of the netball cesspit were almost unimaginable.

One of our girls, in attempting (and succeeding) a valid intercept, followed through after she had won the ball and accidentally clattered into one of the opposition players.

It was obviously an accident. She had no way of stopping her momentum after winning the ball.

She apologised, helped the girl she knocked over get back on her feet, and that should have been that.

But a few weeks later, in my capacity as a parent trustee on the board of trustees, we learned that the school we had played had complained to the organisers about the incident.

Not only that, but in the weeks after that game, they had illicitly filmed our subsequent matches and had sent their video dossier as evidence to support their claim that the girl involved in the incident was out of control and should be banned.

This video – illegally made but professionally edited – was being used to humiliate and destroy the confidence of a 10-year-old girl.

How warped were the adults who made this complaint? It must have taken an enormous amount of time, effort and emotional investment, and there were so many points along that journey of making that video where someone could have woken up to what a truly awful thing they were doing.

But when a sport is toxic, the red flags are ignored – not even seen, and behaviour like this is neither sanctioned nor discouraged.

It becomes the norm, which is why a couple of years after the filming episode, my daughter was playing a game for her intermediate school team when one of the opposition parents started losing the plot, screaming at our kids and the umpires.

At halftime she came on to the court and tried to force her way into the team huddle to scream at the girls that they were all dirty players and should be ashamed of themselves.

It turns out that this was the first game her child’s team had lost all season, and presumably, that was all a bit too much for her to deal with.

It all made more sense after the game when I saw her leaving in a Range Rover which she had parked in a disabled spot.

A few months after Mrs Range Rover had spat her proverbial dummy, my daughter’s team found themselves in Tauranga at the Aims Games.

For the uninitiated, the Aims Games are the single worst idea in the history of bad ideas. It’s a supposed nationwide festival – as many as 25 sports can be played at Aims – where intermediate-aged kids from all over the country gather in Tauranga.

My cynical use of the word “supposed” reflects my certainty that it is not a festival designed to give kids a once-in-a-lifetime sports experience at all, but a licenced opportunity for misguided parents to live their sporting dreams vicariously, and for predatory high schools to roam the sidelines hoping to snaffle the next great thing.

It’s a worrying combination of ego, ambition and self-interest – which obviously meant it was right up netball’s boulevard.

I didn’t have any desire to see my daughter go, but I had less desire, after she was picked, to be the parent who said no, and so off she went, unaware that every part of me knew this was a bad idea.

When disaster did inevitably strike, it was in no way a shock, other than that the specific nature of the catastrophe was unexpected.

In all the various ways I imagined that week would go wrong, I certainly hadn’t foreseen that the two teachers in charge would have a blazing row with one another in front of the kids – leading to one of them getting in her car and abandoning her duties.

None of the kids were sure what had started the fight, but they think it was a disagreement about selection.

I think back to the day I stuck my hand up to volunteer to coach the primary school team and wonder, knowing what I know now, whether I would have still done it and whether I might even have tried to persuade my daughter to never have played netball.

But whenever I ask that question about whether I regret getting involved, the answer is always no because it was never about me.

My daughter, with no pressure or anything ever being said, wanted to play.

She had moments, throughout her whole time at school, where she hated the culture of netball – the pushy parents, the ambitious coaches who couldn’t work out they weren’t in charge of the Silver Ferns and the salty kids who couldn’t play fair, but she typically found herself in a team with enough like-minded souls to make it worthwhile.

I hated it much more than she did, but that’s maybe because I was lucky enough to go to school in a more innocent age when sport was more about running wildly for an hour while the geography teacher tried to get things under control.

For me, school sports really did provide a genuinely fun experience that instilled long-life values in me and my teammates.

As a netball dad, I couldn’t ever see how the sport was helping my daughter grow as a person, and I certainly couldn’t see that it was teaching her life-long values.

I think it may even have mentally scarred her a little bit, and the best thing I can say about her school netball experience is that it has made her better equipped to cope with adversity.